The World Championship for Star Wars Armada was this past weekend up at Fantasy Flight Games. Not only that but there was a side team tournament as well. If you follow competitive play, you kinda gotta be hiding under a rock to not know these things so I state the obvious.
I played in Friday’s round of swiss, it was over at the alt location as compared to over at the Fantasy Flight Game Center. No biggie tho, as it was only a very short walk away.
Probably the first thing you’ll notice is the tables. Yeah it was a bit crowded, those exactly 3′ wide tables are killers tho we had space on the side, so I was very glad I was traveling light still, least for me, it wasn’t a big deal. I’ve played in a few game stores with similar setups.
For the 4 rounds of swiss, I went 5-6, 5-6, 9-2, 1-10. The last game was against CaribbeanNinja which was crazy awesome to play against one of my fellow “vassal” players. Likewise for my 2nd game had a ‘rematch’ of sorts against Bill whom I had originally met at regionals at FFGC a few months back. I ended up 23rd over all, kinda meh, I had 2 critically bad mistakes in my first two games, both had their costs but live and learn and even with all the talent in the room I think the best part is every game was winnable. The over all point spread wasn’t too bad. Even with my record I was just 5 points from being in the top 3rd. That speaks to a very competitive field of players of equal skill.
This was from round 2, Bill and I going at it. One of my VSDs having gone poof and that MC80 was proving to be an absolute bear to take out. Thankfully I did get it, otherwise this one would have been a blowout. Instead was a 3 MoV 5-6 loss.
Meta:
So going to get up on the soapbox a bit. With X-Wing there’s lots of talk about the meta this, meta that, run from a set of known lists, fly reasonably well and you’ll be pretty competitive presuming the dice cooperate. This is the X-Wing meta.
This same concept is trying to be applied and thus the discussion is trying to be jammed onto Armada players that there must be some meta, fly these lists and that’ll elevate your game.
I’m calling bull. I don’t think we have a X-Wing like meta in Armada. What we have is tactics. We have powerful abilities, but I challenge the concept of a meta as it has been recently defined. It is also why I love Armada as much as I do, the game is pretty wide open.
Case in point, in X-Wing, older waves are pretty much uncompetitive. If you buy an old ship, you’re doing so to get an upgrade card to apply to a newer wave ship. In Armada, ships from the Core box are still good. Skyshuffler was kicking butt with CR90s. Hell VSDs were doing just fine. Y-Wings when flown with good strategy, proved worth their points.
In Armada, it’s how you fly it, it’s how you stack your capabilities and execute those capabilities on the tabletop that matter. And good rolling hit/crit dice help too…..
So to those Armada fans that suddenly feel the urge to go raid their local game store to attempt to put together a top 4 emulating Armada list because that’s the ‘new’ meta… don’t. Just don’t. Instead, pull up those achieved twitch streams from WWPD, or the Worlds Games, and watch how people use various ships, combos etc, and especially pay attention to the tactics employed.
Armada doesn’t have a meta. We have tactics the fuel your game play. (And we also fly casual.)
Twitch
The semi and final match for Armada were on Twitch. You can watch the rerun here. Well, well, well worth your time!.
Team Tournament
Saturday afternoon, was the 600pt team tournament. This was a seriously great time. 
Originally it was supposed to be just 8 teams but thankfully FFG opened this up to 16 teams since they didn’t need the space for X-Wing. Lots of very happy Armada players as a result.
The downside of the team play is that ‘friendly’ effects like BCC, or activations didn’t occur between you and your team mate. However admirals like Dodonna that get to pick from 4 crits did apply.
Brent and I ran our dual ISD, heavy squadrons Imperial list that we agonized over for months with a couple of very last minute changes… cause that’s how we roll. We had a 10 point bid and were Player 1 for both rounds.
Our first game was against the 2015 World Team winner, they were flying a YT swarm with MC30s and CR90s. Our ISDs and 200 pts of squadrons met the challenge. We burned through the YTs way way faster than I thought we would and the firepower from our ISDs was doing pretty well.
We ended up winning this one.
Second game was against Caribbean Ninja and friend … (gah, I’m so bad with names), who had a somewhat similar MC30and CR90 list but with less squadrons. Here, I made the critical error playing my ISD on the left of Brents when it should have been on the right which would have put it into the action, where it needed to be.
We ended up losing this one, the MC30s did their job tho our squadron play was once again very effective. My firespray horde just couldn’t land enough damage at the end. We played Intel sweep and that 75 points was a major deciding factor in the loss. Was an awesome game tho!
All in all, I really like the team tournament format. Couple of rules fixed I think are still in order, especially in the way of friendly effects but haven’t play tested that, so that might in fact be a very bad idea, or another way to consider it is just have one admiral and thus making it a full 600 on 600 team game. These are minor quibbles.
F4t L00t
Over all not a bad haul. They did give everyone a copy of the participation cards for all the games at Worlds. Plenty of games I don’t play so that’s probably eBay material I guess. The leather case for keeping cards it pretty awesome.
For each round, during Armada they did put out loot that the winner got to take with them. All of it was prior prize kit material so many/most already had it or several copies of it. 🙂
The one thing I didn’t win that I seriously had some mega want for was the special VSD foil card since I like to play VSDs now days…. sigh.
Next week … regionals! I can’t wait.